The subject matter herein relates generally to electrical components and methods and systems of manufacturing electrical components.
Electrical components, such as circuit boards, typically have coating layers applied to substrates. For circuit boards, the coating layer may define a conductive trace or circuit on the circuit board and/or may be used to enhance electrical properties of the electrical components. The coating layers may enhance electrical properties such as by enhancing the conductivity of the electrical component and providing electrical connections between components which are assembled on the circuit board.
The coating layers are conductive metallic structures applied to the substrate. Application of such layers are typically accomplished either by deposition of the conductive metallic structures by using masks (e.g. vacuum evaporation, sputtering, chemical vapor deposition, plating) or by printing metallic pastes or inks on the substrate and then a subsequent thermal post-treatment. Problems exist for these conventional application processes. For example, the smallest producible feature sizes of the conductive metallic structures in deposition from a gas phase are limited by the structure sizes of the masks used (usually on the order of millimeters or greater), and a large part of the material used will not be utilized for the actual coating and must therefore be expensively recycled. Additionally, printed and conventionally thermally treated structures (e.g. in the oven) feature poorer electrical properties in comparison to pure metals, since the printing requires the addition of non-metallic additives such as glue, binder or additives to adjust the flow properties necessary for printing. In the thermal post-treatment these additives are only partially removed from the layer, causing the coating layer to have poorer electrical properties than coating layers having higher metallic contents, such as those approaching pure metal. Additionally, thermal stress during the deposition or during the thermal treatment is problematic. Some methods, such as MID (molded interconnect device) and LDS (laser direct structuring), use special polymers which contain metal catalysts. Use of specialty materials in such processes is expensive and the chemical coating process can take a very long time.
A need remains for methods and systems of manufacturing electrical components that are cost effective and produce high quality electrical components.